WELTLITERATUR

In 1935, John Eglinton published an account of Joyce in Irish Literary Portraits. It must have seemed to Joyce, wrote Eglinton, ‘that he held English, his country’s spiritual enemy, in the palm of his hand’. Alas, the English language ‘found itself constrained by its new master to perform tasks to which it was unaccustomed in the service of pure literature. . . . Joyce rejoiced darkly in causing the language of Milton and Wordsworth to utter all but unimaginable filth and treason.’

In 1935, John Eglinton published an account of Joyce in Irish Literary Portraits. It must have seemed to Joyce, wrote Eglinton, ‘that he held English, his country’s spiritual enemy, in the palm of his hand’. Alas, the English language ‘found itself constrained by its new master to perform tasks to which it was unaccustomed in the service of pure literature. . . . Joyce rejoiced darkly in causing the language of Milton and Wordsworth to utter all but unimaginable filth and treason.’